ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
27d ago
It would be exceptionally easy to make him both well known and universally reviled. Imagine the hit piece a talented killer at the NYT could make about Sam Hyde.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
I think phrasing it as "Progressivism is atheistic puritanical christianity" captures some nuance that "it came from protestantism" doesn't.
ArmedTooHeavily
22d ago
Not anymore, emergency auto braking is becoming pretty common.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Writing off entire major genres of art is needlessly impoverishing yourself. I'm not even a rap fan, but it is obvious that there is artistically great rap music.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda
You have got to be kidding me. It's a song about how he likes to watch other people fuck his wife, how huffing nitrous oxide is one of the only things that makes him feel better, and how he (a black man) hails Hitler. It's a post-modernist half-joke meme song.
rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?
I think this is the vast majority of people on this website. Hlynka was definitely right about that. Yarvin called them (us) "dark elves" in that one substack post (which did have some good insights, but dear lord is he terrible at optics), and the same people are the "tech right" that has been so recently ascendant until like 8 hours ago. The extremes always pull the moderates to the edges (h/t martyrmade's "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem", the best podcast about Israel and Palestine that's ever been made), and the culture war has pulled scott's "grey tribe" towards the blue and red, and in more even proportions than you'd think.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
The "authoritarian blip" of the last 10k years is certainly not overweighted, because it coincided with the development of absolute human mastery over the entire world. It's heavily weighted in people's estimation of what matters because it was a heavy-ass ten thousand years.
ArmedTooHeavily
21d ago
I don't see how that's relevant to my point at all, which is that that death rates don't tell you much about rates of bad behavior. Obviously cars are more likely to kill someone, ke=1/2mv^2 and cars have a lot more m and a lot more v. I think cyclists commit bad behaviors much more often.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Please do. IMO there's a huge Rickover shaped hole in the sort of broader rationalist/slatestarcodex universe, he's massively under-appreciated.
ArmedTooHeavily
27d ago
This Kurzgesagt video evokes a similar feeling to me: losing something that can never be regained, the crushing weight of the rules of material reality.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
As someone who lives in a city that's really gone to shit because of feral homeless, this kind of strawmanning is a pet peeve of mine. All that it would take to clean up the problems with the homeless is enforcing laws currently on the books. They harass somebody? Prosecute them. They jerk off in a library? Prosecute them. They dump out a garbage can on the sidewalk to look for reimbursable cans? Prosecute them. The problematic homeless are constantly committing crimes, JUST PROSECUTE THOSE CRIMES. That's all it would take!
I can't say that I would object too hard if my city adopted Judge Dredd rules and started executing vagrants, but there's no need for any tyranny at all besides the tyranny of basic law enforcement.
ArmedTooHeavily
27d ago
I also grew up on Pointless Waste of Time. FYI, the guy who ran PWOT, Jason Pargin (nom de poast David Wong) still has an internet presence. His twitter feed is pretty damn funny. He now has a substack that I think is pretty good and in particular does a very solid job of threading the needle between "don't piss off the blue normies" while still being actually insightful, same basic thread as he did back in the day. He's also been very successful on tiktok (not really my thing, can't comment on quality or anything), I think that's actually mainly how he mainly makes his living.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines
You are wrong in about fifteen different ways here, but I'll highlight this one: humans are in fact machines, just very complicated ones made out of meat.
ArmedTooHeavily
3mo ago
Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters.
Nope. Absolutely fucking not. Not only will further subsidization just incentivize more homelessness, we have massively increased our homelessness spending concurrent with the homeless problem getting worse. We've run this experiment and it didn't work.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Quote attribution, please
ArmedTooHeavily
29d ago
Relevant, perhaps, but still unwise to attend.
ArmedTooHeavily
11mo ago
Not having read your article
this seems like a bad-faith article
classic stuff.
ArmedTooHeavily
5mo ago
This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.
As polite feedback, I think your post would be better without this sentence and that this is almost universally true about this sentence.
ArmedTooHeavily
9mo ago
Reality tv is not "real." You are drawing strong, condemnatory conclusions about people in the real world because of the way characters in a TV show behave.
Perhaps you shouldn't be too quick to condemn anyone for ignorance.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:
To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.
To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.
ArmedTooHeavily
6mo ago
"For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically"
-Will Durant
A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon. So my analysis is mainly focusing on Portland, because that's both where the problem mainly is and where the political will driving all of this originates from.
So: In my opinion, many far-left beliefs are luxury beliefs adopted for their value as status signals. The practical considerations tend to be secondary to the value as a social signal and the costs of these beliefs aren't paid by the people espousing them. People who want to abolish the police aren't typically at risk of being robbed, people who want to subsidize homelessness don't usually live near the homeless, people who want to ban all guns don't usually need to physically protect themselves from violence, people who want to legalize drugs don't interact with drug addicts.
The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Several events have compounded each other to produce this situation:
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Portland has incredibly lax policies around street homelessness that approach subsidization. This started with then-mayor Charlie Hale's "Housing State Of Emergency" in 2015 which forbid sweeping homeless camps and has gotten worse ever since. Homeless camps filled with people literally driven insane by drugs are ubiquitous. Local governments have gone as far as distributing tents (22,000 in two years!) and even foil and straws for smoking fentanyl to the homeless.
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Following the nine-month anti-police protest/riot/siege at the Portland Justice Center in 2020, the city has massively de-policed. This is a combination of the police deliberately reducing enforcement as a "silent strike", the cops being massively under-manned, and city policies that prevent police work. We are talking multiple-hour response times for everything except life-threatening violent crimes actively being committed. Someone I know personally caught a guy trying to steal the catalytic converter off of his car then followed the perp in a car chase with 911 on the phone for an hour and a half until he lost him. The cops never showed, they contacted him by phone the next day to take a report.
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We legalized drugs completely, as you noted.
These factors have combined to make the drug/homelessness problem so bad at this point that it is seriously negatively affecting everyone in the city. Every person I know who lives in Portland has, in the last couple of years, been victimized by crime and had multiple negative interactions with the drug addicted homeless. Business are closing and the downtown core of Portland is dying, office workers are refusing to return from work-from-home because of how unsafe it is, and Portland is losing population for the first time in living memory as people flee the dysfunction. The luxury beliefs are finally extracting their costs from the belief-holders, and that's why the tide has turned on this specific issue. However, I don't think you can extrapolate this shift to any greater shift in progressive sentiments. I've had a lot of conversations with people about this: almost universally being a "good progressive" is still very much a core part of the identity of most Portlanders and they are only very begrudgingly ceding ground on drug legalization specifically. They absolutely do not draw any conclusions from this about any of their other beliefs; this threat to their identity is compartmentalized away.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Just finished "I, Claudius" (big thumbs up) and started "Cute Accelerationism", which is basically about "cuteness" as an inhuman thing summoned from the Outside by technology. One of the co-authors was in the CCRU with Nick Land and this is very much both in the tradition of and sort of a send-up of Landian accelerationism. I haven't yet decided what I think of it or how seriously to take it; some portion of it is definitely a bit/gimmick but it's a really delightful gimmick (the physical book itself being tiny and cute is sort of emblematic here). Whatever it is, I'm really enjoying how it manages to be dense and obscure while simultaneously being really fun.
This interview with the authors tipped me over the edge to buying it after Amazon recommended it to me: https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism
ArmedTooHeavily
1yr ago
This comment from back when we were on the reddit by @SerenaButler (not sure if they're still with us) discusses the idea you're talking about, and is imo very insightful. Original: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ey1zdz/comment/fh6z9pz/
Text: As a somewhat aside, for the longest time as a kid and/or student I never understood why "Access to jobs" was a cause celebré for advocacy campaigners. Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit). Money, sure, everyone wants that. Jobs, no. It's like campaigning to be given sickle cell anemia rather than a malaria vaccine: you are asking for a horrible things that coincidentally happens to be upstream of the result you want, rather than asking for the result you want.
The solution to this problem became apparent the first time I'd worked a few jobs: to wit, many jobs are sinecures where you doss about with your work friends, get paid mostly for "presence", and are not actually required to exert your muscles (intellectual or literal) at all. So that's why people want """jobs""". Government's promising to deliver """jobs""" is really a promise to deliver what people actually want, money-for-nothing, with merely the most tissue-thin sop of "labors to be performed" in exchange for these monies to keep up appearences.
To bring this back around to the quoted point: yes, having understood the above logic, campaigners absolutely would have no problem pushing for unqualified people to get jobs, because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction. It does not really need to be completed and no-one will suffer if it is not completed so it doesn't matter if the people assigned to it are unqualified. Most jobs (especially public sector ones) are just dolled-up wealth-transfer programmes, and campaigners understand this, and governments understand this, and """generate jobs for the X community""" is a dog-whistle for "free money for X".
EDIT: Through this rubric, lots of (apparently very irresponsible) Blue Tribe campaigns suddenly snap into focus as perfectly reasonable. Women in front line infantry? Well, if you believe that government jobs are all sinecures and tasks to be performed are fictitious and everyone knows this, therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "upper body strength" or whatever probably are dealing in bad faith misogyny; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ burly dudebros rather than letting women sup from the greenback firehouse. Affirmative action Ivy League admissions? Why not, qualifications = credentialism = fake, there's no real tasks to be performed at Harvard or in post-Harvard employment, so therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "meritocracy" probably are dealing in bad faith racism; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ Good Old Boy WASPS rather than letting minorities sup from the credential spigot.
If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.
No, statistics show that cars cause deaths 8x more. That doesn't tell you anything about cyclist behavior, because cyclists are unlikely to cause deaths. My experience has been that cyclists violate road laws much more frequently and egregiously than cars; I see bicyclists run red likes roughly 10x more often than I see cars do so, and I see a LOT more cars than bicycles on any given day.
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